Skip to main content

zBC12, the new family member

By

Yesterday after more than a year's delay my zBC12 mainframe finally booted up. This is a machine that was donated to me in hopes to advance the hobbyist community, which I am eternally grateful for.

Image 1: Athena, the zBC12 that just now got online

Then what is the main selling point of the zBC12 versus the z114? You might recall my article System z on contemporary zLinux where I explained that running modern Linux on a z114 is hard. This is the main selling point for me to upgrade - being able to run things like more modern Linuxes than z114. While the latest OSes in zLinux, z/VM, and z/OS require z13 or newer - a zBC12 still allows me to run a few releases newer software.


Image 2: The operator himself in the picture with Athena

Perhaps one of the bigger deals that is very welcome is the support for OSA-Express5S. This means that while previously you needed both PCIe and I/O bays in order to have both effective higher speed connectivity like 8G FC or 10 GB Ethernet as well as a way to access 3270 consoles, you can now move the consoles to OSA-Express5S cards that are in the PCIe bays eliminating the need for having the I/O bay all together.



Image 3: Athena's front side in the 2828-H13 configuration

Finally, the zBC12 is a welcome incremental upgrade to the fleet. Hopefully it can lead to some cool things, potentially even maybe some kind of clustering between the z114 and zBC12. We will see what me and my friends cook up.

Thanks to all my friends that made this happen and a huge thanks to the anonymous donor that gave me this machine! I could not have done this alone.

Comments

  1. LouieSeptember 28, 2021 at 12:41 PM

    Interesting read, and extra nice with the images.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Michal WeintraubOctober 29, 2021 at 3:14 PM

      You should be able to partition the z12 and have an internal coupling facility.....

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Buying an IBM Mainframe

By
I bought an IBM mainframe for personal use. I am doing this for learning and figuring out how it works. If you are curious about what goes into this process, I hope this post will interest you. I am not the first one by far to do something like this. There are some people on the internet that I know have their own personal mainframes, and I have drawn inspiration from each and every one of them. You should follow them if you are interested in these things: @connorkrukosky @sebastian_wind @faultywarrior @kevinbowling1 This post is about buying an IBM z114 mainframe (picture 1) but should translate well to any of the IBM mainframes from z9 to z14. Picture 1: An IBM z114 mainframe in all its glory Source: IBM What to expect of the process Buying a mainframe takes time. I never spent so much time on a purchase before. In fact - I purchased my first apartment with probably less planning and research. Compared to buying an apartment you have no guard rails. You are left
14 comments
Read more

Brocade Fabric OS downloads

By
Fabric OS is what runs on the SAN switches I will be using for the mainframe. It has a bit of annoying upgrade path as the guldmyr blog can attest to. TL;DR is that you need to do minor upgrades (6.3 -> 6.4 -> 7.0 -> ... > 7.4) which requires you to get all  Fabric OS images for those versions. Not always easy. So, let's make it a bit easier. Hopefully this will not end up with the links being taken down, but at least it helped somebody I hope. These downloads worked for me and are hash-verified when I could find a hash to verify against. Use at your own risk etc. The URLs are: ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib/software13/COL59674/co-168954-1/v7.3.2a.zip ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib/software13/COL59674/co-157071-1/v7.2.1g.zip ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib/software13/COL59674/co-150357-1/v7.1.2b.zip ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib/software12/COL38684/co-133135-1/v7.0.2e.zip ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib/software13/COL22074/co-155018-1/v6.4.3h.zip ftp://ftp.hp.c
2 comments
Read more